'When running quickly, all animals are challenged by their lengthy response times which comprise nearly all of their available movement time - even the fastest reflex for the control of running is remarkably slow.' She adds: 'If a small animal puts its foot in a hole when sprinting, there is barely enough time for it to adjust its motion while the foot is on the ground, and a large animal has no time at all - it has to wait until the next step.' More says their findings have implications for all animals, no matter what their size. 'What was more interesting to us is that these delays are mostly offset by movement times that also increase with size - relative delay is only twice as long in an elephant as in a shrew, putting large animals at only a slight disadvantage.' 'Not surprisingly, we found that reflexes take a lot longer in large animals - about 17 times longer than their smallest counterparts,' says SFU postdoctoral researcher Heather More. Since an animal's life can hinge on how quickly it can sense and respond to stimuli, the team set out to quantify the speed of the fastest reflex involved in the locomotion of terrestrial mammals, in animals ranging in size from minuscule shrews to massive elephants. The study is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 'We sought to understand how these building blocks are configured in different sized animals, and how this limits their performance.' 'Animals as small as shrews and as large as elephants are built out of the same building blocks of nerve and muscle,' says Max Donelan, a professor of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology (BPK) and director of SFU's Locomotion Lab.

Speediness horse